At the Ferdowsi and Homer Conference that opened at Athens’ National Research Foundation on January 19, Theocharidou said, “Ferdowsi is a poet of all eras, who expressed the idea that good and evil guarantee or endanger man’s happiness.”
She described Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh” as an unparalleled masterpiece.
“Over the past 500 years, the ‘Shahnameh’ has been rendered into Turkish, Arabic, English, Sanskrit, German, French, and Italian, and now I’m enjoying translating an excerpt of the masterwork into the Greek language,” Theocharidou added.
“The book is so valuable that Mr. (Julius) Mohl, the French translator of the ‘Shahnameh’, spent 50 years translating it, i.e., 15 years more than the time that was spent for its creation.”
The two-day event was organized by the Iranian Embassy in Athens in collaboration with the Council for the Promotion of Persian Language and Literature.
Ferdowsi (940?-c.1020?) has been called the Homer of Persia. He was born near Tus in the Khorasan region and married at the age of 28. About eight years later he began the work for the “Shahnameh” (“Book of Kings”). It took Ferdowsi 35 years to complete the great epic poem.
The “Shahnameh” contains 60,000 rhyming couplets, making it more than seven times the length of Homer’s “Iliad”.
MMS/HG
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MNA